Yes. Your company filename must meet these requirements:
- it should contain only alphanumeric characters
- it can’t contain special characters, such as /, – . ( ) < > | [ ] { } ?
- it can’t contain the space character
- it must contain no more than 64 characters, 4 of which are the trailing .qbw
- the entire file path for the company name must be 256 characters or less
When you first specify the name of your company, QuickBooks uses that information for the name of the QuickBooks company file (.qbw). Once you have created a company file that doesn’t violate the restrictions, you can safely change the name of the company within QuickBooks and include characters otherwise prohibited. If you’ve already created a company file with a filename that includes prohibited characters, you can safely rename it.
Some ignore these file naming requirements. Having created a QuickBooks company file name that violates them and observing no apparent problems, one might be tempted to falsely conclude that the requirements don’t apply. Instead, they do apply, and it’s likely only a matter of time before a failed operation can be traced to violating these file naming requirements.
A great example of this is a situation we observed in QuickBooks 2009 with a company file name that ended in a space (e. g., MyCompany .qbw), just before the file type. That lone space blocked QuickBooks’ automatic backup procedure from working. The failed operation gave no error message and no hint that it was due to a violation of the file naming requirements.
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Thank you for the article. Naming restrictions never occurred to me. I would have thought that QB would warn that an invalid filename was being used.
Are Underscores allowed, i.e.
qb_company
Both the underscore and hyphen should work, as they are legitimate alphanumeric characters. Users of newer QB versions have reported that automatic backups work with company file names containing a space, so the note at the end of the article may have been specific to the version and release available at the time the article was written. For some situations a good way to reduce punctuation and spaces in file names yet preserve readability is to use camelcase text, as in ThisIsMyCompanyFile.qbw. That is less helpful for a company name similar to XYZInc, though.